Modern flight deck displays (or cockpit displays) for vehicles (such as aircraft or spacecraft) display a considerable amount of information, such as vehicle position, speed, altitude, attitude, navigation, target, and terrain information. In the case of an aircraft, most modern displays additionally display a flight plan from different views, either a lateral view, a vertical view, or a perspective view, which can be displayed individually or simultaneously on the same display. The perspective view provides a three-dimensional view of the vehicle flight plan (or vehicle forward path) and may include various map features including, for example, weather information, terrain information, political boundaries, and navigation aids (e.g., waypoint symbols, line segments that interconnect the waypoint symbols, and range rings). The terrain information may include situational awareness (SA) terrain, as well as terrain cautions and warnings which, among other things, may indicate terrain that may obstruct the current flight path of the aircraft. In this regard, some modern flight deck display systems incorporate a synthetic terrain display, which generally represents a virtual or computer simulated view of terrain rendered in a conformal manner. The primary perspective view used in existing synthetic vision systems emulates a forward-looking cockpit viewpoint. Such a view is intuitive and provides helpful visual information to the pilot and crew.
Often, synthetic vision systems utilize onboard remote imaging sensors (e.g., radar, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), laser detection and ranging (LADAR) in military contexts, infrared (IR), ultraviolet (UV), and the like) to augment or enhance the forward-looking cockpit view and provide a visual representation of obstacles, objects, and other man-made and/or non-terrain features within the aircraft's current operating environment which may or may not be accounted for in the various databases (e.g., terrain databases, obstacle databases, airport databases, and the like) used for rendering the synthetic perspective view. These enhanced synthetic vision systems are particularly useful when operating a vehicle or aircraft in conditions of reduced visibility, such as, for example, whiteout, brownout, sea-spray, fog, smoke, low light or nighttime conditions, other inclement weather conditions, and the like. For example, an enhanced vision system may utilize real-time radar data in conjunction with one or more terrain databases to render a visualization of a landing zone for helicopter landing during brownout, such that the operator of the helicopter may ascertain the location of terrain features and various non-terrain features, such as other vehicles and buildings, that are proximate to the landing location and not represented by a priori databases.
However, current sensor-based enhanced vision systems often produce visually-noisy displays. For example, if the resolution of the sensor is too low, or the sampling rate is too slow, or the sensor performance is negatively impacted by the operating environment, the enhanced vision system may not accurately represent the size, shape, and/or particular features of an object or otherwise represent the object in an ambiguous manner. Thus, although a pilot and/or crew may utilize the enhanced vision system to recognize a likely location of an object, the pilot and/or crew are unable to glean detailed information regarding the type and/or configuration of the object. In addition, if the sensor sampling rate (i.e., the rate that the sensor updates) is too low relative to the speed of a moving object, the enhanced vision system may be unable to accurately resolve the moving object. For example, a moving object may appear to jump across the display, appear as being blurred or smeared across the display, or the size of the moving object may be exaggerated. These visually noisy displays increase the perceptual processing and mental workload of the pilot and/or crew to adequately parse the displayed information, thus reducing the potential information superiority to be gained from the enhanced vision system.